The Imaginary Student Is Doing Great. The Real Student Gets Left Behind
Universities fucking love the word access. They paste it into strategic plans, build entire webpages around it, and drop it during orientation right between pointing out the tutoring center and the emergency food pantry. Then, without missing a beat, they design their classes for a student who can be on campus at ten in the morning, answer emails all day, buy the textbook before financial aid drops, meet with a group whenever everyone else feels like it, take on an unpaid internship, and recover from an illness without missing anything important.
This imaginary student does not have children. They do not work nights or scramble between side gigs just to pile up enough cash to finally get some land of their own. Their car always starts. Their Wi-Fi always connects. Their body behaves exactly according to schedule. They never have court, treatment, probation, parole, or a case manager demanding the exact same hour their professor does. The imaginary student is doing great. Everyone else is filling out forms.
We call these institutional policies “neutral” because the exact same rule is copy-pasted into everybody’s syllabus. But a rule is not neutral just because it is applied identically. If the rule was designed around one very specific, highly privileged kind of life, equal enforcement simply punishes everyone whose reality doesn't match the original blueprint. Universities claim their standards apply equally to everyone, but those standards are built entirely around a phantom student who possesses total control over their time, body, money, transportation, technology, and personal life.
Nobody in the administration openly admits this is the expected baseline. They don't have to. The expectations are baked right into the schedule. A universal rule predictably produces unequal consequences. Mandatory attendance, daytime office hours, inflexible deadlines, sudden schedule changes, and group projects that demand evening availability aren't inherently neutral. Neither are required campus events, expensive tech requirements, or participation grades based on public speaking. The point here isn't that academic standards are inherently bad. The point is that universities routinely, and conveniently, confuse academic rigor with administrative convenience. Knowing the material is an academic standard. Being physically present at 9:00 a.m. while sick, working, parenting, or reporting to a probation officer has absolutely nothing to do with whether someone actually learned the damn material.
When your life inevitably falls outside this default design, you are shoved into the exception machine. Students must repeatedly prove that their circumstances are real enough to deserve basic flexibility. You have to disclose disabilities, financial emergencies, family crises, medical histories, legal obligations, or housing instability to bureaucrats or professors who may still just decide your problem isn't serious enough. It is a hell of a system. The institution creates the barrier, and then demands the student produce the trauma and the evidence of being harmed by it just to get a pass.
This is exactly where colonialism enters the conversation—not as some trendy academic synonym for “unfair,” but as a precise system for declaring one specific way of living as normal, rational, disciplined, and legitimate. The colonial mechanism at play here is universalization: taking one culturally and historically specific way of organizing time, knowledge, behavior, and responsibility, and forcing it as the natural standard for everyone. People closest to that standard appear disciplined and capable. People farther from it are labeled unreliable, deficient, unprepared, or unwilling to assimilate. Obviously, colonialism isn't acting alone. The entire structure is reinforced by capitalism, ableism, patriarchy, class hierarchy, and the carceral state. But the shared maneuver remains the exact same: create the standard, hide who it was built around, and blame the individual for failing to match it.
Whenever this gets brought up, the predictable objection is that flexibility equals lowered rigor. But this isn't an argument that students should never have deadlines, attend class, complete difficult work, or experience consequences. The real question is whether a requirement actually measures learning, or if it merely measures a student’s ability to organize their entire life around institutional demands. A genuinely rigorous course can still offer multiple ways to participate, reasonable deadline windows, recorded access, and paid or flexible experiential learning. It can have transparent accommodation processes and assessments that measure knowledge instead of blind obedience. It can easily distinguish repeated disengagement from an actual life emergency. We can keep the standards while questioning the bullshit wrapped around them.
Look at any university policy and put it to the test. Ask who is assumed to have complete control over their schedule and what kind of physical or mental capacity is treated as normal. Ask what the student must already be able to afford, and what housing, internet, transportation, and family stability are assumed as a baseline. Ask if the student is assumed to have complete legal and physical autonomy. Ask what unwritten academic behaviors they are expected to already understand, and who is forced to disclose private information just to receive basic flexibility. Ultimately, ask if the requirement measures learning, or if it just measures compliance.
Universities do not need to invent a perfectly accessible imaginary student. They need to stop designing education around one imaginary life. Students are not deviations from the institution’s natural order. They are workers. Parents. Caregivers. Disabled people. Poor people. Formerly incarcerated people. People with unstable housing, shitty internet, sick family members, legal obligations, and bodies that refuse to follow the academic calendar. That is not a list of unfortunate exceptions. That is the actual student population. The imaginary student is the exception. The university just built everything backward.
Works Cited
Cruse, Lindsey Reichlin, Barbara Gault, and Elizabeth Noll. “College Students with Children: National and Regional Profiles - Institute for Women’s Policy Research.” Institute for Women’s Policy Nd Research, January 30, 2017. ++https://iwpr.org/articles/college-students-with-children-national-and-regional-profiles/++.
Hoyos Ensuncho, Maryluz. “Decolonial Practices in Higher Education from the Global South: A Systematic Literature Review.” Journal of Comparative & International Higher Education 15, no. 5 (2023): 12–26. ++https://doi.org/10.32674/jcihe.v15i5.5299++.
Jehangir, R., Roman, R., DeLorme, L., & Vang, Z. (2025). Revealing the hidden curriculum. University of Minnesota, First Gen Institute.
McGregor, Karla K., Natalie Langenfeld, Sam Van Horne, Jacob Oleson, Matthew Anson, and Wayne Jacobson. “The University Experiences of Students with Learning Disabilities.” Learning Disabilities Research & Practice : A Publication of the Division for Learning Disabilities, Council for Exceptional Children 31, no. 2 (2016): 90–102. ++https://doi.org/10.1111/ldrp.12102++
McKibben, Bryce, Jiayao Wu, and Sara Abelson. “New Federal Data Confirm That College Students Face Significant—and Unacceptable—Basic Needs Insecurity.” The Hope Center for Student Basic Needs, August 3, 2023. ++https://hope.temple.edu/npsas++.
Wang, Sarah Yu, Olivia Howard, Eloise Burtis, and Lauren Bauer. “Which Nontraditional Students Are Also in the Labor Force?” Brookings, December 7, 2023. ++https://www.brookings.edu/articles/which-nontraditional-students-are-also-in-the-labor-force/++.